Compose and comprise seem like mischievous brothers who are opposites but masquerade as each other to fool their friends. They’re very similar — both handle parts-to-whole relationships — yet they’re mirror images in how they handle it.

The standard division is this. Compose has the parts as the subject and the whole as the object. Comprise makes the whole the subject and the parts the object. So we get:

(1) […] Pickwick was able to cultivate a sound that was more organic and unique to the six members that compose the band.

But is this a real distinction? I was tempted to say that it must be, because it seems like everyone knows about it. But then again, a lot of people have trouble maintaining this distinction, and I regularly see comprise used in sentences like (1). And, if I’m being perfectly honest, sentences like (2) sound rather odd to me, even after I’ve assured myself that they are appropriate. So is there a true distinction that people happen to be bad at maintaining, or is the distinction just another spurious one to add to the heap?

Well, the distinction clearly exists in one direction; while many people could use comprise in sentence 1, very few would use compose in sentence 2. As a result, we’re running into a similar situation as with jealousy/envy or verbal/oral. It’s not a matter of whether the two words are synonymous, but rather a question of whether one is more general than the other.* As usual, here’s the table of known possibilities:

whole-to-parts

parts-to-whole

comprise

YES (2)

? (1a)

compose

NO

YES (1)

Can comprise take parts as its subject and the whole as its object? Well, it’s easy to find people who say no, both ontheInternet and inusageguides.

But I find it interesting that even committed prescriptivist writers, who completely believe in this rule, have trouble remembering it. Here’s a quote from William Safire:

“I wrote […] ‘They comprise a terror coalition’ […] Greg Walker of the International Association of Chiefs of Police blew the whistle on this one, suggesting that I should have written constitute, meaning ‘make up.’ He’s right.”

And likewise, from James J. Kilpatrick:

“The rule here is that the whole comprises the parts, and the parts compose the whole. […] My problem is that I cannot seem to remember this.”

So, many grammarians want there to be a distinction, but even they have a hard time maintaining it. Does it exist in the language-at-large? It doesn’t seem to, judging from the Corpus of Contemporary American English:

527 singular-subject comprises
468 plural-subject comprise

In current usage, comprise is appearing in senses (1) and (2) almost equally.** How about historical usage?Well, interestingly, the earliest complaint about the misuse of comprise found by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage wasn’t until 1903. But comprise was being used both ways well before that. The OED has examples from 1794 and 1799 on through to the present day. MWDEU notes that this usage was labelled “rare” in earlier editions, but this label has since been removed. So for at least two centuries, comprise has had a parts-to-whole usage that has only been gaining in popularity.

But why would comprise allow the two different usages? Well, why wouldn’t it? There’s very rarely a situation where it’s unclear which is the whole and which are the parts. And there’re parts-to-whole situations where compose doesn’t quite sound right to me, but comprise does. For instance, this MWDEU example from 1916:

“[…] the ringlets and bracelets did not comprise the whole of this young man’s soul.”

"So fellas, is it fair to say that we comprise an awesome band?"

All that said, there’s no denying that many people have a strong conviction that compose and comprise are mirror images. Although one can justify the use of parts-to-whole comprise, it’s an uphill battle. I wouldn’t recommend using it unless you’re spoiling for a fight. But if you are, you’ve got a pretty solid argument up your sleeve. The final table, with the grey indicating this “yes, but…” situation:

*: I’ve taken to calling these “asymmetric pairs”, but I’m sure there must be a better name out there.

**: If you’re interested in the details, I searched the part-of-speech labelled COCA for singular or plural nouns ([*nn1*], [*nn2*]) followed by comprises or comprise, respectively, and summed over all different nouns. For a baseline (in case singular or plural subjects were generally more common), I also searched for compose. The results were very noisy due to overlap with other senses (e.g., “he composed himself before speaking”, “she composed a symphony”), but there were 40 singulars to 84 plurals in that search.

It’s worth noting that the (perhaps surprisingly common) presence of plural subjects for comprise in COCA is not driven by spoken examples. Only 19 of the hits come from spoken data; magazines and academic writing supply the bulk of the examples for both kinds of subjects. It’s appearing in edited writing, not only in unedited speech.

About The Blog

A lot of people make claims about what "good English" is. Much of what they say is flim-flam, and this blog aims to set the record straight. Its goal is to explain the motivations behind the real grammar of English and to debunk ill-founded claims about what is grammatical and what isn't. Somehow, this was enough to garner a favorable mention in the Wall Street Journal.

About Me

I'm Gabe Doyle, currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Language and Cognition Lab at Stanford University. Before that, I got a doctorate in linguistics from UC San Diego and a bachelor's in math from Princeton.

In my research, I look at how humans manage one of their greatest learning achievements: the acquisition of language. I build computational models of how people can learn language with cognitively-general processes and as few presuppositions as possible. Currently, I'm working on models for acquiring phonology and other constraint-based aspects of cognition.

I also examine how we can use large electronic resources, such as Twitter, to learn about how we speak to each other. Some of my recent work uses Twitter to map dialect regions in the United States.

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10 comments

About “comprise,” our style guide says “Do not use unless you have no other choice. ‘Comprise’ has a history of misuse and is misunderstood even by many native English speakers.”

As people who produce content, we don’t want to use terms that users might think we’re using wrong (a “damned if you do” problem, aka, a skunked term). Or even use terms that might send readers to a dictionary, since it’s not our job to teach people English.

I don’t remember now whether it was on this blog or somewhere else, but someone just recently said that a term that invokes widespread confusion in native speakers is effectively at the end of its lifespan. We’ve removed it from our corporate corpus, so to speak, and if other people stay away from “comprise” for similar reasons, that will hasten its slide into obsolescence.

There may be widespread confusion about the distinction between comprise and compose, but is there any evidence that people are confused about its intended meaning? Whether it’s used in the whole-to-parts or parts-to-whole sense, it’s pretty much always clear from context what was meant.

And as opposed to a slide into obsolescence, I found quite the opposite: it’s picking up steam. It’s been slowed down somewhat by editors, but now that even editors can’t remember the rule, it’s becoming more and more common even in edited prose.

I’ve been wondering about this too. I wonder if comprise started to broaden its meaning because it fills a niche where compose doesn’t quite work. I suspect that in the parts-to-whole sense, they’re not exactly synonymous but have some subtly different meaning. It seems that comprise connotes a somewhat more abstract relationship than compose does. It’d be interesting to look at a deeper look at the two and see if there’s something to it.

3. Whole and parts are coextensive in space and time, so:
A. Difference is only one of aspect, not epistemology.
B. Relationship is abstract, so directionality is weak, easily confused.
C. Brain is evolved to conceive of whole and parts in parallel; both are salient.

But these don’t explain why confusion is on the upswing. Maybe this one does, though:

4. Bands comprise members. Members compose bands. But bands compose music (well, from an outsider’s point of view anyway).

Is it telling that both your example sentences are about bands vs. members? Could the modern explosion in music availability be the straw that broke the lexicamel’s back?

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